Last weekend, The Boston Globe ran a series of slides based on The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 (Tarcher/Penguin), which came out yesterday. (The slides, a follow-up story, and the Web chat can be reached here).
The slides were provocative and whimsical and, inevitably, simplistic, but the response from the teens and twenty-somethings was voluminous. More than 500 comments came in, and some of them ran several paragraphs refuting the “dumb” allegation. The denial was sometimes furious, and so were the emails I received.
“You’re wrong. And in all the wrong ways, too. Take care where you tread,” one said.
“Now you and your big English Proffesor ego was probably nit-picking at my entire email. Great,” went another.
And another: “I’m writing to tell you that you’re an ass.”
Another: “I wish to thank you for showing me who the dumbest generation is: yours.”
Another wrote on his blog, “The older you get, the more you think it’s okay to call other people dumb. Don’t get old, like Bauerlein. The jerk.”
And more of the same.
Most of these messages and posts contained substantive criticisms of the slides, however, and it seemed like a teachable moment was at hand. I responded to the messages solely on substantive grounds, conceding a few points about the slide show and providing links to research supporting the thesis. The next stage was encouraging. Most of them wrote back in an altogether different attitude, still critical of the thesis but dropping the rancor and sometimes apologizing. In fact, they went out and did some research of their own to find evidence of intelligence among their peers. And they promised to send further materials as the debate over youth and technology unfolded.
I take that as a lesson in teaching approach. Obviously, these correspondents resented the “dumb” tag, understandably, even though it clearly didn’t apply to them. Their pique is a good sign in that it means they care enough about intellectual values to worry about not meeting them.
But it’s also a bad sign in that it means they don’t hear it often enough. For an elder to chastise them for not reading enough, studying enough, caring enough about history and civics, acquiring knowledge as part of their maturity — those criticisms they should hear all the time. The standards of adulthood should be an abiding rebuke to the dispositions of adolescence. But it seems that too many of the kids rarely hear it, and so when they encounter it, it sounds hostile and degrading, destructive criticism instead of constructive criticism. They should understand that genuine concern for the intellectual welfare of students yields judgment as well as encouragement, blame as well as praise.
